Google Plus One

A lot of tech writers are currently going bananas about something they thought they heard Google CEO Larry Page say on the company's year-end earnings call: that Google Plus, just six months after its launch, has 54 million daily users. That may or may not be what Page hoped they would hear, but it's not actually what he said, and it's probably nowhere close to true.

Of course this did not go by a lot of tech news writers, and really what Page said was:

So 60% of the 90 million people who have created Google Plus profiles engage with some Google product every day, but that product could be Gmail, Google Documents, Google Calendar or even just Google Search.

Big difference!

Half of Facebook’s 800 million-plus users use Facebook every day. Sixty percent of Google Plus’s 90 million users use some Google product every day.

Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,

People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.

"We know from our own experience this will transform businesses worldwide," said Horowitz, Google+ vice president of product.

For example, the Google+ Circles functionality, which lets users segment their "friends" list into different groups, will allow for "intra-enterprise sharing" through Circles for the IT department, the marketing department and the like, that are public within an organization but not necessarily to people outside, he said.

The use of this workplace version of Google+ has "transformed" communications within Google, becoming the preferred tool for many interactions that previously happened via email, wikis or other "sharing mechanisms," Horowitz said.

While Google is yet to provide an official API for Google+, enterprising developers have taken matters into their own hands with everything from a statistics service to a media player plugin already available for the nascent social project. Now comes an unofficial solution for something a lot of users have been hoping would arrive – RSS feeds.
PlusFeed is a simple service that provides an RSS feed of any Google+ user’s public posts. Simply find the unique number at the end of their profile URL, and then add it to the PlusFeeds URL. So, for example, the URL of The Next Web’s Google+ RSS feed is: http://plusfeed.appspot.com/103907806627406122152

Back in March, Google officially started rolling out the +1 Button in its search results, allowing users to vote up the pages they found most useful. Two months later, on June 1, it launched a widget that lets website owners integrate the button into their pages, just like they do with Facebook’s ‘Like’ and Twitter’s ‘Tweet’ buttons. See more.

Google+ doesn’t have an inbuilt way to transfer your Facebook friends over to the new social app, but since Facebook is clearly dead and everyone is on Google+ nowadays it’s best to get your contacts moved over before Facebook’s servers are switched off for good.